1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer security. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for securely executing a background process.
2. Related Art
To protect confidential information from getting into the wrong hands, users often employ cryptographic techniques when storing and/or transmitting the confidential information. When a user needs access to encrypted information, the user typically executes a method to decrypt the encrypted information. Executing this method often involves first performing a verification operation to ensure that the user has permission to access the encrypted information.
In many cases, background processes also need to access encrypted information. Hence, a system that uses a background process which accesses encrypted information must find a secure way to give the background process access to the encrypted information. Previous techniques for enabling a background process to access encrypted information involve hard-coding passwords or cryptographic keys into the code which the background process executes. This can be extremely time-consuming for systems that support many background processes and many cryptographic keys. Furthermore, the security of the hard-coded cryptographic keys is only as great as the security of the storage medium containing the executable code for the background process.
Hence, what is needed is a method for executing a background process without the problems listed above.